The robotic tele-surgery systems enable performing remote surgery operations with minimal invasion. These systems include master and slave robots. The master robot works as the interface between the surgeon and the slave robots. The surgeon operates and controls the slave robots using the master robot, while sitting or standing in an ergonomic position. The master robot receives the surgeon's commands and movements, scales them and removes tremor, and transfers them to the slave robot to be applied to the surgery site. As a result, the surgery may be performed with higher accuracy and less trauma to the patient. In fact, the robotic tele-surgery systems enable combining the human knowledge and decision making abilities with the advanced technical features of robotics to provide the capability of performing remote surgery, as well as improving the outcomes of the surgery by enhancing the surgeon's dexterity.
The slave robots that are located at the patient side include a number of surgical and endoscopic robotic arms that are controlled by the surgeon. The robotic surgical arms have several degrees of freedom to provide sufficient work-space and maneuverability for surgery. They are usually integrated with special surgical instruments at their end-effectors to interact with the tissues under surgery. The use of integrated and exclusively designed surgical instruments increases the costs of surgical operations using robotic tele-surgery systems. The high costs of using the existing robotic tele-surgery systems are mainly due to the costly maintenance and the demand for using single- or limited-use robotic appliances.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide improved robotic tele-surgery systems, methods and techniques to allow easy replacement of the single- or limited-use components to reduce the maintenance costs. It would be further desirable to provide designs and methodologies that can make the robotic tele-surgery systems capable of working with non-exclusively designed surgical instruments that are widely accessible at lower prices. Therefore, there is a need in the art for a tool adapting device that can facilitate the connection and manipulation of relatively inexpensive manual laparoscopic surgical instruments on a robotic surgery arm.